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Options to Stay in Your Home

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If you are facing financial difficulties—whether they are short or long term—start exploring your options today.

Even if you haven’t yet missed a mortgage payment, but are worried you might fall behind soon, now’s the time to take action. You may be eligible to refinance or modify your mortgage loan, lowering your payment and making it more affordable. Or, if you’ve missed payments and find yourself buried under late fees and past-due amounts, you may qualify for a temporary (or permanent) solution to help you get your finances back on track and avoid foreclosure.

Are you thinking of moving to Long Island and wondering what your cost of living will be? well that's what we're going to talk about today.

Cost of living is what it costs to afford necessities like food, utilities, shelter, and transportation. We call those the Four Walls. Before you get set on moving somewhere make sure you can take care of these Four Walls and maintain your standard of living in the city you’re considering. A good first step is to use a cost of living calculator to see how your current cost of living compares to where you want to move. So, give yourself a fist-bump because you can already check that off the list.

Now, let’s dig into the nitty gritty of the expenses that go into your cost of living calculation.

Long Island Is The Second Most Expensive Place To Live In The United States. When it comes to living on Long island we all know it isn't the cheapest place to live. ... It turns out that Long Island is the second most expensive place to live in the United States. It cost a family of four $103,000 a year just to get by.

When people are moving to a new state one of the terms that gets thrown around a lot is cost of living, and how that compares to where you currently live versus where you're planning to move. Obviously cost of living is a relative thing. So, if you live in a less expensive part of the country, moving to Long Island NY might seem a lot expensive. If you live somewhere where property values or taxes are low, or non existent, then moving to Long Island New York might be more expensive so it is an important thing to research. For example, if you moved from Queens or any of the five boroughs, taxes there are cheaper.

But, if you compare the home prices instead, you will find that things balance out. Although the taxes are higher, your payment for square feet is less expensive than the NYC. Not to mention you will own a large piece of property, which means more space. Although, we have the combined lower property prices with the high property taxes, we found a much better quality of life on Long Island. Today we're going to share some quick tips on how to figure out what the cost of living might be in Long Island New York depending on where you're moving from, and just some ways that you can research that topic before diving into making the move.

One of the most important determinations you need to make before moving to a specific city or town is how much it will cost to live there. So, when we talk about cost of living, we're talking about the amount of money you will need to make in order to sustain the lifestyle that you'd like in this new place. This could include the prices of goods and services, taxes, real estate, all of those things factor into whether or not it's affordable to live in that area and again, affordable is a relative term, but that's kind of how you figure out whether the cost of living in a certain spot will work for you. There's also some online tricks on the wonderful internet, my go to source of all information initially, and there's ways that you can type in where you currently live, where you're moving to what the cost of living might be.

You can look up tax records, those are all public so that's another piece of information that might be helpful. The only time it's difficult to calculate is if you plan on buying a new construction home because those taxes are not accurate until the home has already been built and owned by a homeowner for over a year so that's kind of a tricky area but there's always ways to look at that information to get a more accurate, big picture.

The largest factors that go into considering a cost of living would be the housing cost, and that can include HOA fees upgrades to the home maintenance to the outside everything that goes into home ownership.

Transportation if you need to take public transportation to get to work or the cost of gas if you're commuting, which in current situations, most of us are working from home so maybe that's not as big a factor right now. Food, so how much the groceries costs food to purchase food, if you're going out to eat things like that taxes on purchases and entertainment so things that you're paying for to just enjoy life.

Just to give you kind of an idea of one of the resources you can use to calculate this difference in cost of living versus where you live now is smartasset.com. So as a quick example if you currently live in Atlanta, GA and you want to move to Long Island NY and you currently make $40,000 as your pre tax household income to maintain that standard of living in Atlanta you would only need to earn $52,522 a year.

The cost of living is 31% Higher in Long Island, compared to Atlanta, and then it breaks that down further so housing costs, two bedroom apartment rent in New York average is about $2,499 a month. In Atlanta, it's only 1,425, an average home price for a three bed two bath home in New York is $403,900 and in Atlanta $349,998 so huge differences. Again, those are average costs for a larger metro area so it's not necessarily a specific neighborhood, but it gives you a general understanding.

If you have not visited my channel before, I have a video about the ten reason you should move to long island. I am living it over here so you can take a look at.

Now, the price of gas in New York is often higher than the national average. GasBuddy data from May 2019 has a gallon of gas in New York going for $3.08, which is almost 20 cents higher than the $2.89 U.S. average. Insurance cheap compared to the Insurance in NYC. According to CarInsurance.com, the average insurance rate for drivers in Manhattan tops $4,400 per year and $2400 in Long Island.

If you’re okay with giving up your car, New York’s public transportation system is one of the best in the country. But like everything else in the State, it’s one of the most expensive. A monthly transit pass in New York costs $127 per month. For a direct comparison, consider this: monthly transit passes in Los Angeles and Chicago cost $100 and $105, respectively.

According to Numbeo.com data from May 2019, groceries in Long Island usually cost about $471.34 a month, per person. For the U.S. as a whole, the average is almost $150 cheaper, at $324.20. Of course, Long Island is famed for its restaurant scene, and those who choose to dine out regularly will see their food budget soar.

So, you have to weigh all those options and this gives you a good picture of what those might be. If you try to use Smartasset.com, this one is a little more detailed. It allows you to choose more specific cities or counties in the United States, as well as how many people are in your household and then gives you a breakdown of the tax cost differential housing, food, and also shows some information on mortgage rates based on the housing prices and the different areas you're looking.

I hope those resources are helpful for you when you are looking into finding out the cost of living difference between where you currently live and where you're looking to move in Long Island New York.

Now, if the area you want to move to has a higher cost of living than you can currently afford, not all hope is lost. It just means you’ll need to be willing to adjust your standard of living, try to bump up your salary when you find a new job, or move to a zip code with a lower cost of living that isn’t far off from where you really want to live.